On the evening of August 14, 1986, Joanne Riedan said good night to her mother from the bottom of the stairs. She was nineteen years old, wearing a pale denim jacket with a small silver brooch pinned to the left lapel, a gift from her grandmother that she wore every day. She told her mother … Read more

In 1987, IBM staked its future on a machine designed to take back the personal computer standard it had unintentionally set free. The Personal System/2, launched on April 2nd of that year, was the most expensive proprietary gamble in the history of personal computing. The company wagered its market leadership and hundreds of millions of … Read more

For nearly six decades, the murder of Louisa Dun remained a closed chapter in Bristol’s history, a case that had gone cold before most of the investigators working it had even been born. In the summer of 1967, the 75-year-old widow was found dead on the floor of her living room at 58 Britannia Street, … Read more

For thirteen years, she had stood beside Clint Eastwood on the screen, in a western, in a police thriller, in two comedies with an orangutan. But in April 1989, while she was at work directing a film of her own, the locks were changed on the Bel Air house she had spent years rebuilding. Her … Read more

In October 2022, a cardboard filing box sat on a folding table in the driveway of a colonial revival house in McLean, Virginia. The tag read two dollars. The man who had lived there for forty-one years had died the previous spring, and his children, after three days of sorting his belongings, had set out … Read more

On May 18, 1979, Barbara Hutton lay dying in Suite 273 of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles. The room cost $150 a night, a bill she could barely afford. Once worth the equivalent of $900 million in today’s money, she now possessed exactly $3,500. The woman who had owned the Pashia diamond, the … Read more

In May 1912, James Aldridge, a twenty-four-year-old census enumerator in the mountain districts of Rand County, West Virginia, set out to complete the final entry on his assignment list: a household recorded simply as “Aldrich sisters, Crow Hollow Road,” with no information about its composition. The household had not been officially visited in at least … Read more

By the early 1960s, Connie Francis was one of the biggest stars in American music. Her clear, powerful voice and wholesome image made her a sensation among teenagers who bought her records by the millions. Her name sold not only music but sweaters, diaries, and charm bracelets. At twenty-two, she had moved beyond the concert … Read more

In October 1972, Thomas Earl Briggs was a 31-year-old repair contractor from Price, Utah, who called home every Sunday without fail. He was on the road for a job at a rural school district facility outside Page, Arizona, driving south through the Red Rock country of southern Utah on US89. On the evening of October … Read more